Internet of H2O competition challenges three communities to come together to solve for real-world issues and establish a Smart Lake strategy that requires the integration of sensors, advanced networking and insights generated from data science.

Sayantek and EdX teamed up as HydroTrek to propose an innovative way of monitoring one of the largest water bodies, Lake Erie in the United States. Lake Erie is a complex eco system and its water quality is determined by a number of factors including the time of day, weather and the season. For instance, severe weather could increase the amount of fertilizer-derived nutrients in the water and affect the water quality.

To address these challenges, team HydroTek leveraged Sayantek’s IoT Edge Platform solution and EDX’s predictive analytics engine to come up with a monitoring solution.

One of the sites (Covington, KY) gathers water quality data via sensors directly connected to Raspberry PI. At another site in lake Erie, water quality data is gathered via LoRA nodes. This data along with the weather data from USGS is then ingested into Microsoft IoT Hub. Each site also runs the core EDX analytics engine.

eRED orchestrator is hosted in AWS VM. It manages the application life cycle as well as the configuration and device status management of edge instances in Microsoft Azure and Raspberry PI.

At each site where water quality is being monitored , HydroTek EDX detects anomalies by comparing live data with historical data.